


To Have and to Hold

by MGNemesi



Series: From the Vault (OLD Nemestories, revamped) [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Captain America - The First Avenger
Genre: Angst, Captain America - The First Avenger - Freeform, Growing Up Together, M/M, Romace, Sappy, Slice of Life, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 13:09:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7893865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MGNemesi/pseuds/MGNemesi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The little moments where one fell deeper in love with the other.</p><p>*Written for a prompt back in 2011 on LJ, unearthed in 2016 with the hope I might record this as a Podfic</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer...

  
_*twiddles thumb* This...was written back in 2011 for a[prompt](http://capkinkmeme.livejournal.com/1000.html?thread=67304#t67304) over at [](http://capkinkmeme.livejournal.com/profile)[**capkinkmeme**](http://capkinkmeme.livejournal.com/)  ; now I got into my head I'd like to record this as a podfic, but yeah, I KNOW me. I'm a slow-poke. So I thought I'd better start posting the text, and the rest might come.  _

  
 

 

 **Title:** To Have and to Hold.

 **Author:** Nemesi.

 **Fandom:** Captain America: The First Avenger

 **Originally posted on:** LJ, 16/08/2011

 **Imported on AO3:** 28/08/2106 

 **Genre:** Slice-of-life. Romance. Angst.

 **Word Count:** A little under 5200.

 **Characters:** Steve Rogers (pre and post serum), Bucky Barnes.

 **Pairings:** Steve/Bucky.

 **Rating:** mostly PG-13.

 **Disclaimer:** Marvel owns my soul, and also all the characters and themes herein portrayed. I'm putting everything back inside Marvel's sandbox as soon as I'm done playing with their toys.

 **Warnings:** Self-betaed. Slash. Character-death (canon events).

 **Continuity:** Movieverse, definitely.

 **Summary:** The little moments where one fell deeper in love with the other.

  
 

  
 

* * * * *

 

**for better**

  
 

“Come outside with me,” Bucky whispers, low and urgent and _happy,_ so much so that Steve's mind goes, irrationally, to pirates and treasures and digging gold from the mud with their own bare hands.

He sits up in his bed, gingerly. Coughs once, his chest rattling like a tin can filled with pebbles, and rubs the sleep from his eyes. The orphanage is dark, so quiet the silence seems to stretch into all directions like a physical thing. The other kids must be all asleep, Steve surmises, and rubs at his eyes a second time.

“Come outside with me,” Bucky repeats, still quiet; still urgent and happy, as if he were bursting at the seams with emotion. His hair is matted to his forehead, not just damp but _dripping_ , curled haphazardly and darkened to a shiny black.

Steve wakes up a bit more, and the sound of rain finally registers to his ears. Beyond the glass window, the night is black as pitch, water falling in silver sheets that ping and beat and draw all sorts of music from the cobblestone streets, the wooden shutters, the steel and glass of the lampposts, the brick walls. When he looks back at Bucky, his eyes have sharpened a bit, loosing the last residue of sleep; but the look in them is still open and trusting, if only a bit dubious.

“It's raining.”

Bucky nods solemnly, and a single raindrop drips from the tip of his nose onto Steve's bed.

“ _Pouring,”_ he corrects. “Come on. We don't have much time.”

His hand is splayed open, inviting. A little damp with either rain or sweat, and much paler than Bucky's tanned, grinning face.

“I ought...” _to stay in bed with this weather._ Steve wants to say, and internally frowns. He doesn't like to concede defeat to his fragile health, and he already had to do so once today, when the other kids had gone off on a hike that cost them the best part of the day.

Steve's not the kind to begrudge someone their fun; but he had been the only kid at the orphanage who hadn't collected a treasure in the surf, or had an adventure at the docks, played tag among the giant crates or went diving from the boardwalk. It stung, if only a bit. He doesn't want it to sting anymore.

“...to tell on you,” Steve says at last, with no real bite to his words, and pushes the blankets from his legs.

The floor is cold under the bare soles of his feet, and his toes curl instinctively. He begins to fumble with his clothes, blinking when Bucky huffs and envelopes him in a coat, something warm and sour-smelling and much too big to belong to a child.

“What? Like I'd let you catch a cold,” he answers to Steve's confused glance, and Steve feels hard-pressed not to grin.

Bucky is the best friend he could ever hope for; he neither underestimates nor coddles Steve. He doesn't tease him for his shortcomings, but neither does he pretend that Steve is right as rain when it fits his own agenda. He trusts Steve to know what his own body can and cannot endure; he lets Steve fight his own battles, taste his victories and his defeats, but he's always a step behind him, supporting him, backing him. Always, _always_.

He's always there to save Steve from a pinch, and to get a few punches in for him; he's always there to play cards when Steve is bedridden and everyone else is shrieking after a ball in the backyard. And the best part of it all, is that nothing of what he does for Steve looks like a burden, but rather something he wants, even _enjoys_.

For Bucky to be up and about at such an ungodly hour, it means he must have concocted something to cheer Steve up after the beach-trip fiasco. Something strictly Steve's-weak-health friendly, too, because Bucky might get careless with his own safety every now and then, but never with Steve's.

His consideration makes Steve's heart swell, each and every time. Mama would've been happy to know his child had found such a good match, wouldn't she? He can imagine it, sometimes – his mother standing with her apron at the stove, letting Bucky taste a spoonful of the soup she's cooking; instructing Steve to put a third plate on their table for his friend, and pinching Bucky's cheeks until they're as pink as apples.

“What's the emergency?” Steve asks, as soon as he's dwarfed in the coat and holding onto an umbrella wide enough to cover the whole of Madison Square. Under the monstrosity, Steve is already sweating a bit at the nape of his neck and the inside of his elbows. He doubts one single drop of rain could get on him, and he sort of pities the ones that might succeed, because Bucky looks like he might make them evaporate through sheer-will alone, he's so intent.

Bucky inspects Steve's attire one last time, nods, pushes a hat on his friend's head as an afterthought, and then grasps onto his wrist and tugs him out and onto the rain.

Steve has to duck his head against the wind, but Bucky presses Steve's face onto his neck and off they go, running towards whatever wonders Bucky wants to show him.

  
 

  
 

**for worse**

  
 

  
 

The punks of Tenth Avenue call him many things.

Shortie. Shrimp. Bag of sticks. Nosy beanpole _brat_ whose breathing sounds like a freight train. Steve is all that, so he doesn't mind. Not _really_. He can't deny he is an underweight, asthmatic teen, with a perchance to butt in when he sees someone being cornered or mistreated.

Bucky, on the other hand, _does_ mind the name calling, and he minds that _Steve_ doesn't mind, because, “you're not a stick-skinny shrimp or a loud-mouth or whatever those sleazy cats call you. You're--” he rakes his fingers down his hair at this point, eyes wide and forcing a frustrated puff of air between his lips. “--you're _Steve._ You're _not_ your asthma, or your weight, you're _more_ than that, you're _better_ than that, better than _them,_ and--” Bucky's hair is standing in all directions now. His hands flee his head to curl around Steve's arms, mindful of his injuries, shaking him as if he could somehow push his meaning into Steve through contact.

There is a cut on his lip he acquired when he stepped between Steve and a bully's punch, and a drop of blood sits round and shiny on top of the wound, utterly distracting. The side of his face looks tender and hot, as thought it is about to swell and turn purple. Steve feels an urge to touch it, something sharp and crisp like lightening; but he aborts the motion at the last moment and ends up fingering his own swollen cheek, instead.

“--and if they don't see that, then they're just _stupid._ _Got it?_ ”

Steve offers a dutiful nod. He looks sullen and thoughtful, as if the injuries don't hurt but just make him tired, _weary._

Bucky echoes Steve's sigh with one of his own, shakes his head and then straightens purposefully.

“You,” he says gently, crowding against Steve and helping him to his feet, because this is what Bucky is, essentially – a warm and larger-than-life presence that wraps itself around Steve and keeps him steady when he falters, that has his back with faithful efficiency, so Steve's eyes don't have to stray from his goals, and he can keep moving forwards. “You have more guts in a single pinky than all those idiots combined. They _wish_ they were as special as you are, Steve.”

And then his fingers are on Steve's face, on his cheek and forehead and the tip of his nose and tracing the curve of his bottom lip, and Steve's chest sort of _expands,_ filling with air like a balloon. His heart trips over itself like a clumsy colt, that tries to run and ends up spread shaking on the ground. He nods again, unsteadily this time, wondering distantly at the fluttery tightness in his chest that ought to feel like asthma but is anything but.

They link arms, each supporting half the other's weight, and amble down the smelly alley towards the orphanage, their hearts pounding steady and loud in the encroaching darkness.

  
 

  
 

**for richer**

  
 

  
 

“What'cha got there, Steve?”

Bucky drops down beside him, cheeks flushed pink with cold. His breath is fogging in the air, tracing glyphs of vapour, but his body radiates a sort of sweaty heat were it presses against Steve's side, shoulders brushing.

The Coney Island boardwalk is steep and long, crowded even this late into the evening. Bucky has been dashing to and fro along the wide avenue to collect sodas and spun sugar, to cajole a nickel from Steve's pocket, and bring him the stuffed bear he'd won at the range with it. They're here to celebrate Bucky's first salary, and if Bucky resents Steve for his aching lungs and his need to sit still and away from the shrieking crowd, he doesn't show.

He smells of sugar and sea-salt, and a bit of clean sweat. His face is so close Steve fancies he can see every speckle of gold and blue in his ice-green eyes. The sea is murmuring incessantly below their dangling feet; somewhere else, one of the rides is humming with electricity and a little girl is laughing softly and the seagulls are calling out mournfully to someone lost. Steve frowns, put-out and feeling a little silly as he scrambles to hide his hands from view.

“Nothing,” he lies. He shakes his head so quickly his hair flops down over his eyes. He has to unlock one hand from where he's hiding them behind his back in order to push it back. He smiles up at his friend, genuine and disarmingly and oh _-so!Steve._

Bucky catches his eye and grins, wide and sudden, and Steve knows he wasn't fooled, know he should have _expected_ the move, he knows, he _knows,_ but he's still caught of guard when Bucky leans over him, nose to nose, and reaches with both arms around Steve's waist to grab the--

“--that's _not_ me. No way.”

Bucky's eyes are blown wide as he looks over the sketch Steve was hiding. It's one of the first things Steve has ever done in colour, and the tones he used are all wrong, Steve thinks regretfully. He managed to scrap a sweet deal downtown, and grab an handful of Hardtmuth crayons for half their price. But even so, he couldn't _quite_ get Bucky's eyes right. Too much blue, he thinks. Not enough green. And gold and silver simply don't come in a crayola box. _Ever._

He paws at the sketchbook, feeling low and foolish, frowning a bit around the mouth when Bucky keeps it out of reach and leans away, sea-smell and tingling heat and all.

“ _Bucky...”_

“No, truly, Steve. This isn't me. I ain't this...” he fumbles for a word, then shrugs. “...nice.”

Steve scowls.

“Of course you are _nice—“_ Steve closes his lips abruptly.

Bucky begins to grin, earnest, but there is a twinkle in his eyes, soft and telling. He shrugs, not quite casual enough.

“Yeah? Tell that to those Hogs and Champ cats downstreet, will you?” he pauses. “But I don't _look_ this nice, Steve-oh.”

 _No, you look better,_ Steve wants to say, but somehow he knows the words won't sound out loud the way they do in his head.

“I know it's not good enough.”

Bucky scoffs.

“Steve, this is _amazing._ That's the point. It's too good – I'm not...”

“You are _not,”_ Steve informs him, closing the distance between them, pressing in until Bucky's elbow is digging in his side and his own knee is against Bucky's thigh, “going to end that sentence. Or I'll be forced to sock you.”

He shakes a bony fist for emphasis.

Bucky cocks an eyebrow. Lowers the sketchbook until it lays between them, sketch-Bucky's face grinning up at them with eyes rendered in a myriad of tones.

“Why, resorting to violence now, Mr. Rogers? I'm appalled.”

Steve makes a low sound, thumps a fist against Bucky's shoulder.

“Someone ought to keep you in line, Mr. Barnes.”

“Well then, I'm glad I've got you with me.”

Waves crash underneath them, their voice soothing and low. Spray glints in the air, moistens the hem of their pants, the darkened fabric clinging cool and soft to the bare skin of their ankles. The breeze stings their cheeks, but they feel warm inside, deep under their ribs, and through their blood.

Their fingertips brush together, and they grin at each other.

Their eyes look like they might light up the night.

  
 

  
 

**for poorer**

  
 

  
 

They never have a lot of presents on Christmas Day.

Once upon a time, they used to get chocolate and peppermint from the ladies of the orphanage, though not each year, and not after they'd turned fifteen. From each other they would get something smaller but truer: they'd wrap yellowing newspaper pages around silly little things, pieces of charcoal for Steve to draw with; that small rubber ball of Steve's that Bucky loved to play with; a nice sea-shell or rock. And once, a piece of molten glass from a fire that had solidified itself into a strange and fantastic shape. Light had glinted through it beautifully, and if you put it against your eye, it would show you the world distorted and funny.

This year is no different. The Christmas tree is small, stripped of most of the foliage, and with little ornaments hanging from the wizened branches: rusty candy boxes, broken sea-stuff, ribbons of coloured paper, nuts and orange peel. It smells better than it looks, like fruit and sweets and with a hint of the ocean clinging to it despite all odds, reminding them of sunshine.

Steve has saved enough this year to make Bucky a scarf and gloves (a set to match his own, and if there is a deeper meaning to it, Bucky needn’t know). Winter in New York can be bitter, and the last thing he wants is to watch his friend go around in those threadbare shirts of his and catch pneumonia.

Bucky sits stunned beside him, fingering the coarse material with obvious delight. He wraps the scarf around his mouth, eyebrows wriggling and making a cowboy impression that has Steve chuckling, no matter how old it gets. Bucky senses the relief through the obvious mirth, and doesn't hesitate to say: “Love it, Steve-oh. Thanks a bunch,” for the sixth time in a row.

Steve shrugs, smiles, tries not to look eager now that it's _his_ turn to unwrap a present. Bucky doesn't fail to pluck that particular vibe either (then again, Bucky _never_ fails to read Steve like an open book). He turns sombre, perhaps a little hesitant. He reaches for the inconspicuous little box sitting under the tree, and hands it over to Steve a bit more forcefully than warranted.

“I – uhm – was a bit on the broke side this year,” he explains as Steve turns the present over and over in his hands, trying to gauge its content by weight and feel alone.

“You mean to say there was ever a time we were _not_ broke?”

Bucky punches him in the shoulder (and really, what does it say about Bucky that the bump is so feather-like Steve barely feels it?), mouth caught between a frown and a grin.

“Fair warning, that's all.”

“I consider myself warned,” Steve answers, and sets to unwrap his gift, careful and methodical. Bucky makes an aborted sound when Steve reveals a little booklet under all that paper. Steve glances up curiously before he opens it, and then freezes.

Bucky cringes.

“I knew this was a bad idea,” he mutters. Then, louder: “Steve, look, I'm sorry if--”

“This is my father.”

Bucky's mouth clamps shut.

There, on the first page of the little booklet, there's the charred remain of an old army photograph, taped at the angles. Steve turns the page reverently, and this time he is met with a newspaper clipping, a blurry picture of the one-oh-seven infantry. Bucky didn't do him the disservice of circling out his father's face among the crowd, but he did list, on the bottom of the page in a neat, slanted writing, all the names of the soldiers in the picture he's managed to discover.

Next comes a series of pictures Bucky _must_ have flirted out of the orphanage archives, things he thought lost after his mother's death, some army propaganda posters, a few articles about his father's unit, plus a nice little sketch of his mom Steve remembers drawing (and throwing away) something like five years before.

He is speechless.

“Bucky...”

“Look, I'm _sorry._ I thought... but if you don't like it, I can...”

“It's perfect,” he says, chocked up for more reasons than the obvious. He's touching his father's face in the first picture, and he can't believe (he didn't _remember_ ) he looks so much like this mountain of a man, didn't remember (can't _believe)_ that they have the same kind-hearted eyes, the same jaw and nose (though Steve's mouth is all his mother's).

He doesn't quite kiss Bucky for his efforts, though the impulse is there, sharp and bubbling like alcohol, and has been for far longer than Steve would like to admit. He reaches out, wraps his arms around Bucky's shoulder and presses his nose into Bucky's neck, nuzzling into the warm, musk-smelling hollow of his shoulder.

It's not the first nor the twentieth time that Steve thinks _I love him_ , but it still takes him off-guard when he realises that _he loves him more than he did five minutes before._

He doesn't think that it'll ever stop growing, this feeling.

He's completely all right with it.

  
 

 


	2. ...in sickness and in health, until death do us part.

 

 

 

 **in sickness**  
 

It feels like he's burning.

A fiery, simmering heath, uncoiling from his abdomen and spreading out, waves thick like syrup, a sticky goo that he's sinking into, liquid fire that laps at his skin, wraps hungrily around his limbs, sinking needle-like teeth in his flesh and spreading green-tinted poison in his veins.

He's feverish. His stomach heaves, dry, and he's drenched in sweat. He hitches all over

(bugs crawling across his body, black things with round malignant eyes, trailing their feelers along his skin and leaving marks as dark as charcoal)

he can't draw breath

(his chest is open, and his heart is pulled out, a clockwork thing, rusty, turning and chinking softly like the wheel at Coney Island, a metal conch clamped stubbornly around a pearl of cool radiance, a picture inside a medallion, and that picture is of---).

He squeezes his eyes shut, bites his lip bloody against a scream, and thinks of better things

(Steve)

better days

_(Steve)_

all that's bright and safe of his memories

( _STEVE_ )

and the litany commences, his name, his rank, his name, his rank, because there's no way he's surrendering any of his secrets to this Nazi _scum_ , the confidential intel and their base's location and the assault schedule and  _Steve's name_.

The tide recedes, bit by bit, like it always does. It may take hours

(days)

but agony always tunes down into something more bearable as the drugs wear off.

He's barely coming to, still half-way between Hell and Italian ground, when something warm is pushed to his cheek, and it's _odd –_ because it feels like coals on his skin, but it also feels like standing in the rain, the coolness soaking through him from under the pulse of brandishing heat.

It feels like lazy afternoons spent sprawled star-shaped on the floor, squinting in the sunlight slanting through the blinds and breathing hard in the dry Brooklyn heat, his nape wet with perspiration and his fingers brushing against Steve's, similarly sprawled in a patch of shadow, a sweating jug of lemonade sitting between them, glinting gold and spreading a thick, mouth-tingling scent in the air.

His eyes are open, they've been for a while.

But now they are also focusing, and they focus on the colour blue, _cornflower_ blue, blue like Steve's eyes blue, and suddenly it _is_ Steve's eyes, cornflower and stricken, staring down at him, and it's Steve's hand on his cheek, warm like a furnace and cool like a blessing, shaky and firm at the same time, and it doesn't even register at first that _this_ Steve is twice _his_ Steve, because he's delirious and perhaps this is life's last joke on James Buchanan Barnes's expense, letting him die with his eyes filled with Steve, but he doesn't really care, because he can recognize _his_ Steve even when his shoulders get multiplied by four, and so he lets himself be pulled up and clings to him and then follows him to what could be either the afterlife or salvation, or even just a big headache and anything in-between, because it finally sinks in that, _oh God,_ Steve's _really_ managed to enlist for _real_ and he's pulled a _Steve_ and come to save Bucky, and Bucky will have to give him a piece of his mind as soon as the world stops spinning, and he'll have to try not to let through how damn _proud_ he is of Steve, only just how  _worried,_ especially after Steve does that comic-book jump across the pit of fire and grasps onto Bucky and hoists him up as if he were a dame in a cheesy Hollywood flick, but Bucky's too delirious to protest and besides the prison _is_ exploding around them and there's flames and debris and shrapnel and whatever all around them and _damn;_ it suddenly occurs to him that _he loves this foolish man like there's no tomorrow._

(but he rather hopes there is. A tomorrow, that is. And a few more days to spare, possibly.)

  
 

  
 

**and in health**

  
 

  
 

“Admiring yourself in the mirror, Mr. Rogers?”

In the weeks to come, Steve will adamantly deny any jumping of any sort, on the grounds that Captain American does _not_ get caught off guard in his own tent, much less gets a fright out of it. Bucky will cheerfully disagree on both accounts, bragging on how he _did_ catch _The Cap_ off guard _and_ scared him out his socks, to boot.

“I never pegged you for the vain type,” Bucky adds, eyebrow raised in pointed inquiry.

Steve shrugs half-heartedly, neither an answer nor the lack of one. Just a short, confused motion, before he goes back to watch his biceps flex in the shaving mirror.

Bucky takes a few steps inside the tent, plants his hip against the cot's frame.

“Talk to me, Steve-oh.”

His voice is coaxing, light as it is. Steve flexes his muscles once more, a nervous twitch.

“Doesn't it look... _odd_ to you?”

“What does?”

“ _This.”_

“In full sentences, Steve. So I can understand what you're talking about.”

“Everyone... everyone's making a fuss about me every since I was changed. They think this is so great but I, I can't even recognize myself, sometimes. I had to relearn everything about my own body, and there are times when I still think of this body as not being... _right.”_ He trails off, tilts the mirror just in time to catch Bucky roll his eyes.

“Figures. Only _Steve Rogers_ could find a fault in  _Captain America's body.”_

Steve scowls. He has to tell himself he's _not_ jealous of his own self; that he  _doesn't_ wish to go back to a time where Bucky had no need for Captain America, as long as he had _Steve_.

“ _That's_ the problem, Bucky. This isn't _me._ I've never been this--” he gestures to his naked chest, the tanned skin taut over rippling muscles, nipples hard and dark on the hairless canvas.

It takes Bucky three strides to reach his side. He touches him on the shoulder, warm and brief (and really, what does it say about Bucky that the touch feels like a brand on Steve's skin, that it pulls at his heart as if they were connected by an invisible string?). Steve doesn't dare turn, but their eyes do meet, through the mirror. Bucky looks earnest, worried in a way that makes guilt pool inside Steve's gut.

“This what, Steve?”

 _Attractive,_ Steve thinks.  _Likeable. Swarmed by people who suddenly_ need _a me that isn't_ me _at all._

“Perfect,” he says instead, frowning a bit when Bucky's troubled expressions clears suddenly, his face splitting into a sunny grin.

“Look buddy, I hate to break it to you, but – the serum didn't _make_ you perfect. It just made the outside catch up with the inside. That's all. This _is_ you, Steve. There's just a little bit _more_ of you,” he squeezes Steve's shoulder, leans in to share a grin, breathing hot and moist against Steve's cheek. “Okay, a _whole lot_ more of you, perhaps. But this is _still_ the little Steve I rescued from bullies and took on every ride at Coney Island.”

“I paid for most of those rides,” Steve manages around the thumping of his heart. When Erskin said that everything inside him would be magnified by the serum, Steve hadn't thought he might mean his _feelings._ But now he was to wonder; because if he loved Bucky before, this that he feels now... it goes beyond love. He thinks he might live another seventy years, and still wake up in the morning with Bucky's image in his mind and his name on his lips.

Bucky flashes him a grin, angled and roughish.

“Well then, _next time_ I take you to the fair, everything will be on me, promise.”

“Like a date?”

“Like a date _where I pay for everything_ , don't forget that.”

“Trying to buy my favours now, Buck? You know I'm not that kind of gal.”

His attempt at humour is feeble at best, if not downright disastrous; but Bucky is chuckling at it, his body shaking with quiet laughter. He presses his face into Steve's shoulder to hide the sound, and curls his fingers around Steve's own. It's an old habit – Steve remembers Bucky doing the same when they were eleven, and thirteen, and sporadically when they were seventeen, as long as they were tucked away somewhere no one could see them.

Usually, the feeling it brings Steve is only half-comforting; while the other half is comprised by this blooming, constricting feeling in his chest; heat that spreads down his neck and pools at his groin; and a sense of rightness he knows he can't let himself sink into.

Today, though – today it's his new, perfect and not-right body, and Bucky's treating it the same as the old, imperfect model, and Steve can't reciprocate the way he always did – tucking his head under Bucky's chin and slipping his hands at the small of Bucky's back, breathing quietly against his heart – but he makes up for it by pushing his cheek to Bucky's own, and closing his hand on Bucky's hips and pulling them flush against each other, cheek-to-cheek, heart-to-heart, knee-to-knee, and _this_ is the only thing about his new body he can agree on being  _perfect._

It still fits around Bucky's own; like two pieces of a puzzle.

“Thanks, Bucky. For... for _everything.”_

He feels the grin stretching against his cheek, feels the amused puff of breath waft against his ear. The hand around his own moves, slithers, until their fingers are curled together in a tight knot.

“My pleasure, buddy.”

  
 

  
 

**until**

  
 

  
 

The shield feels _heavy,_ and how can Steve carry it so effortlessly is beyond him. He barely registers the strain, though, because Steve is down, and that armed monstrosity is advancing on him, opening fire--

  
 

\--and it should feel odd to watch Bucky handle the shield, Bucky stepping in the line of danger to save Steve, like it always was a lifetime before, but it feels right even as it feels awing – the shield glinting in the pale winter sun, flecks of snow melting on Bucky's dark hair, the sweat on his cheek, darkening his collar a darker blue – even as it feels worrying, the panic rearing up inside Steve, the urgency, the--

  
 

\--but Bucky'll be _dead_ before he lets this scum lay a hand on Steve, his Steve--

  
 

\--and Bucky'll be dead if Steve doesn't drown the ringing in his ears, if he doesn't get on his feet and  _goes to him_ , goes to him  _now---_

  
 

**death**

  
 

\---the sound of rapid-fire, sharp and so eerily familiar it's almost a task to get worried, to think anything other than _protect Steve_ , and he fires back, driven and a little drunk on his worry, fires and fires still,  even as he's forced back by the explosions, forced back and out and--

  
 

\--and Steve only needs to stretch, only a little _bit_ , and he's perfect, this _body_ is perfect, _Captain America_ is perfect, so he surely can do that, can stretch the remaining inch and grasp onto Bucky's straining hand, hold onto it and pull him up, up and into Steve's chest,  _dammit_ , because it can't end like this, it can't, _it can't_ \--

  
 

  
 

**do us**

  
 

  
 

  
 

\--Steve's name is ripped from him in a sharp, hollow cry, but he keeps reaching up, even as he falls and falls and falls, even as water opens up underneath him, and ice envelopes him in a shroud of coldness and--

  
 

\--and the plane crashes, exploding on impact, snow rushes at him, sprays up like a giant wave, the coldness spreading, enveloping him in a coffin of ice, and he thinks, selfishly:

_I'm sorry Peggy._

_I'll miss you, Peggy._

_I love you, Peggy._

  
 

And deeper down, where regret mingles with relief and smiles with tears:

_I love you, Bucky._

_I miss you, Bucky._

_I'm coming home, Bucky._

  
 

 

**_part_.**

  
 

  
 

  
 

He wakes up.

Wakes up to the sound of birds, like never before in Brooklyn.

To curtains waving gently in the breeze, washed-white and almost luminous, so unlike the flapping, shredded canvas tent from the army.

He wakes up to a radio droning on about a baseball game; and to memories like the smell of green grass and sunshine in the field, the taste of hot dogs and euphoria; the press of bodies moving in waves around him like a single entity, and the touch of Bucky's hand on his knee, the glint in his ice-green (blue, gold, silver, he never got the colour _right_ on canvas) eyes, the curled edge of his smirk, warm and teasing and full of affection.

He wakes up, seventy years later, with Bucky's image in his mind and his name on his tongue, tasting like pouring rain and blood shining on pink lips and spun sugar and Christmas sweets and ocean's breeze and lemonade and gunpowder and sweat and all that's bright and dark of Steve's memories.

  
 

Just like he'd known he would.


End file.
